I doubt turning off Strict eliminates strong typing, I believe that point was made. What it does is allow late-bound operations in addition to early-bound ones. This would actually improve the productivity of the programmer, because using the bulky explicit reflection approach requires a great deal more source code to be written and debugged in cases where dynamic object use is desired.
Clearly late binding has costs, including performance penalties. That's why one doesn't use it except where warranted. A sort costs resources too though, but you don't forego sorting just for that reason. Instead you avoid sorting lists that are properly ordered to begin with. Perhaps an oversimplification but the same concept, more or less.
It is good to see how .Net is working to integrate the best things from both programming worlds, as well as extending some of these concepts even further.